Living Space: Build us a house, son

When award-winning architect Meredith Bowless parents asked him to design their new home in Ely, he rose to the challenge, says Clive Unger-Hamilton

The words “bungalow” and “boring” seem to belong together, even though architects from Palladio to Frank Lloyd Wright have created single-storey houses of great beauty.

Britain is littered with tens of thousands of uninspiring bungalows, so when Meredith Bowles’s parents asked him to build them an interesting one-storey home, the winner of last year’s Manser Medal for the best one-off house designed by an architect — for his Black House in Cambridgeshire — seized upon the challenge.

Frank and Margaret Bowles had lived for years in a modern house in Saffron Walden, Essex, where their three sons grew up. Once the boys had left home, the couple moved to a contemporary house in a nearby village where they created a vast garden from an adjoining field. It took 10 years, by which time it was becoming too much work.